“A bit of original exegesis that is truly edifying,” observed Father McClosky.
“I don’t preach it as truth, only suggest it as an hypothesis,” said Mr. Clare good-humoredly; “but, there is some authority for it, ’tis of a piece with his treatment of the slave question, and—not impossible, which, I suppose, is the most one can say for it. He was not one to throw an unnecessary stumbling-block in a weak brother’s path; and, besides, it is only the spirit of Communism that is essential to Christianity.”
“Do you ever contradict yourself just a little bit?” asked the doctor.
“As an Irishman, no doubt I do,” was the reply, “but in this case the contradiction is only in seeming. For I believe—though perhaps wrongly—that the time is at hand when we may have both the form and the spirit. Nay, I think—I am sure—that if the human race is to advance much farther than it has done, money must be abolished, the temple of Mammon overthrown, and the Almighty Dollar perish in the ruins. That is the crusade in which I would engage every man, woman, and child who bears the name of Christian, officered by those who call themselves God’s ambassadors.”
“I don’t know,” said Alice doubtfully; “one can do so much good with money.”
“One must do harm with it,” was the reply. “Besides, there ought not to be the need of doing good—of that sort; and under the Commune, where alone it would be possible to dispense with money, there would be no good to be done except with love.”
“Mr. Clare,” said Alice, “what would you do if you were a rich man?”
“I thank God I am not,” he replied; “but if I had inherited wealth that was honestly come by in the first instance, I hope I should do my duty in that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call me.”
“And if the money were coined from the blood and tears of your fellow-beings,” asked the doctor, “would you take it, or starve?”
“Starve!” said Ernest Clare. “Ah! Mrs. Richards shakes her head, she thinks me a terrible fanatic; but only because she doesn’t understand that every age has its own battles to fight, and this against Mammon is ours. I see a very pretty little bronze statuette of the flying Mercury on the bracket yonder, Mrs. Richards, and there is a head of the Capitoline Jove on my own mantel-piece, which I value exceedingly. Yet what would a Christian of the first century have thought of possessing such images? they who would not sit at meat in an idol’s temple, and died in agony rather than offer one grain of incense before an idol’s altar! That, you see, was their battle. Mammon is our enemy. Truly ‘an idol is nothing in this world; and there is none other God but one’; yet, ‘if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.’”